Shopgirl

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Steve Martin is a mild and hazy guy, but does his novella get lost in translation to the screen?

By Peter Schorn

Steve Martin has had an interesting career spanning three decades, starting as the white-suited, banjo-playing comedian with an arrow through his head, proclaiming that he was a "wild and crazy guy". Instead of merely repeating his successful formula from The Jerk, he rapidly moved down different avenues, some leading to critical and commercial success (All of Me, Roxanne), others to lesser outcomes (Pennies from Heaven).

Since his last truly great movie, Bowfinger, he's been wasting his talents in dreck like the Cheaper by the Dozen movies and the misbegotten remake of The Pink Panther and they've obscured the fact that he has a very serious side as an art collector and playwright. A collection of his essays for the New Yorker called Pure Drivel sits in my unread book stack, while his spare novella Shopgirl - considered unsuited by its author to be filmed - came to the screen in 2005 blessed with a career-redefining performance by Claire Danes.

Danes is Mirabelle, a twenty-whatever ¿migr¿ from Vermont with $39,000 in college loans and a boring job selling gloves at the Beverly Hills Saks Fifth Avenue. Her so-called life is a numb cycle of waiting for customers in her tucked-away corner of the store and going home to an empty, tiny apartment with the obligatory cat for companionship. She's also an artist whose work is characterized by vast swaths of charcoal blackness.

One night at the laundromat, she is hit on by Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman), an appalling mess of a clueless slacker who works silk-screening boutique amplifiers, designing fonts as a hobby. When this numbskull asks her out, he pulls up and honks his horn to summon her, hasn't removed the trash from the passenger seat and needs to borrow money for a Dutch treat trip to the movies. (His jaw-dropping suggestion for a condom substitute would make even MacGyver cringe.) As hard to believe that our heroine would even date him, the motivating power of loneliness cannot be underestimated.

However, Jeremy isn't her only option after she waits on Ray (Martin), advising him which gloves to buy based on her preference. Coming home, she finds a mailed package containing the gloves and a note asking her to dinner. While she doesn't know why this divorced fifty-something software tycoon chose her - a detail remarked upon by Martin's infrequent narration - she gets involved with this man who is as reserved, yet kind, as Jeremy is unpolished and inept. When Jeremy hops onto the road crew of a touring rock band, Ray becomes her suitor by default.

While it certainly is a lucrative arrangement, Mirabelle isn't a gold-digger and Ray isn't seeking a trophy girlfriend. As he tells his shrink, he's not looking for anything long-term, but he doesn't make this clear to her. As she receives his luxurious gifts and visits his homes in Seattle and L.A., she makes no demands on him for more commitment, but clearly acts as this may be the lasting connection she hungers for.

Shopgirl is a prime example of a whole which is more than the sum of its parts because while it lacks more than the barest hint of a skeletal story - leaving almost everything for the audience to speculate about what is happening and why - it is still a moving meditation on loneliness and the need to connect with someone, anyone, in a crowded and empty world.

Director Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie) somehow manages to sustain the film's mood - Barrington Pheloung's wonderfully moody and ambient neo-chamber score is a big help - and keep us engaged despite having a romantic triangle with two unsympathetic corners in the form of the shambling Jeremy and the taciturn Ray. Neither of these blokes deserves Mirabelle, but when her choices are "lousy" or "nothing", what is she to do? Go with the slob who appears to deal with the trash by pushing it away from where he's sitting or the man whose houses - not really homes - are so sterile that dropped food qualifies for a "five-minute rule"?

What anchors this almost imperceptible story is Claire Danes' utterly natural and heartbreaking performance. As the film played and she made me wish that some other guy would show up and give her the real love she needs, I realized that Danes was a victim of an egregious snub from the Academy Awards rivaling their failure to recognize Joey Lauren Adams in Chasing Amy. As nice as Reese Witherspoon was in her winning Walk the Line performance, it pales before what Danes has done in Shopgirl. Shame on you, Oscar!

She doesn't get any broad scenery-shredding moments in Martin's wafer-thin script, but we never fail to feel her joy and pain. While her reasons for her choices aren't explicitly given, Danes makes Mirabelle as real a person as Ray and Jeremy are archetypes of the emotionally-crippled elder and the brashly callow youth. After a bright start with My So-Called Life, Dane's career hasn't really had the expected traction and her post-Yale role in Terminator 3 made it look like she may've lost her cuteness with age. Now, it's clear that while she may not fit in with the cast of The O.C. , she should be first on the list for any role that Lily Taylor is too old for; she's that good here. (The scene where she ponders whether to "hurt now or hurt later" still kills me.)

Those who've seen Martin in more serious films such as The Spanish Prisoner won't be surprised by his subtle cipher of a performance, just as no one should've been surprised at Bill Murray's turn in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation. We can see that he's dimly aware that he's going about this relationship all wrong, but is unable to prevent his own inevitable destructiveness. Schwartzman is an annoying one-note tool, but he's hampered by a role which only seems to exist to provide a false choice for Mirabelle. A late-inning sequence involving the cleaned-up self and less pathetic Jeremy and a man-eating co-worker of Mirabelle's (Bridgette Wilson-Sampras) feels like something from another movie and it (and his entire character) should've been cut for clarity.

In many ways Shopgirl is a spiritual companion piece to Lost in Translation, sharing that film's gauzy mood to both good and bad effect. I've encountered people who didn't care for Lost in Translation because they felt that there wasn't a story and I don't try to bully them into "getting it" because these aren't films you "get" as much as films you either get in tune with or don't; the mood carries you or you're left cold - there's not much in-between ground.

If you didn't like Lost in Translation you'll probably loathe Shopgirl and its soap bubble plot. By soap bubble, I mean that while it floats and shines like a slow-motion dream, the moment you poke at its details, it disintegrates into a damp nothingness that makes you wonder if there was ever anything there in the first place. While we can surmise why Ray has chosen Mirabelle, we don't know for sure. While they share mutual affection, we're never shown what they have in common, other than spend a lot of time together. However, despite its flimsy construction, Shopgirl manages to close the sale thanks to Danes performance and Tucker's masterful management of mood and color.